On March 8, 1913, an above-the-fold, front-page article in the Chicago Defender informed readers that “the Modern Joan [of] Arc,” Mrs. Ida B. Wells-Barnett (1862-1931), had marched in the inaugural Woman Suffrage Parade in Washington despite the protests and the “scorn of her Southern sisters.”[i] Robert S. Abbott’s Chicago Defender celebrated Wells-Barnett as both the greatest “race … leader among the feminine sex” and an individual of the “highest type of womanhood.” “She is always to be found along the firing line in any battle where the rights of the race are at stake,” the Defender’s correspondent concluded. On this day, Wells-Barnett was hailed as a conquering heroine.
That was far from the case more than fifty years earlier, on July 16, 1862, when Ida Bell was born to Elizabeth “Lizzie” and James “Jim” Wells of Holly Springs, Mississippi. Still six months prior to Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, the arrival of a firstborn child to the Wells family received little communal fanfare and no notice in the press of a region that was ravaged by Civil War.[ii] Born into slavery, Ida struggled to survive that first year as Confederate and Union forces fought over the strategic supply post en route to Vicksburg, Mississippi. But survive she did. She would soon come to thrive.
Known most prominently as a daring anti-lynching crusader, Wells-Barnett worked tirelessly throughout her life as a political advocate for the rights of women, minorities, and members of the working class. Until the 1970s, Wells-Barnett’s story was relegated to the footnotes of American history. Since that time, scholars have begun to place the life of Wells-Barnett within the context of the social, cultural, and political milieu of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Political Pioneer of the Press seeks to extend the discussions that these scholars cultivated over the last five decades. This edited collection weighs in on the full range of communication techniques—from lecture circuits and public relations campaigns to investigative and advocacy journalism—that Wells-Barnett employed to combat racism and sexism and to promote social equity in her transnational social justice crusade. It also explores her legacy in American culture and her potential to serve as a prism through which to educate others on how to address lingering forms of oppression in the twenty-first century.
Editors: Lori Amber Roessner & Jodi Rightler-McDaniels.
Contributors: Jinx Coleman Broussard, Chandra D. Snell Clark, Kris DuRocher, Kathy Roberts Forde, Norma Fay Green, Joe Hayden, Jodi Rightler-McDaniels, Lori Amber Roessner, Patricia A. Schechter, R. J. Vogt.
Lori Amber Roessner is an associate professor at the University of Tennessee’s School of Journalism & Electronic Media. In fall 2012, Roessner launched the Ida Initiative, a public history initiative designed to promote the study of the life, work, and legacy of Ida B. Wells-Barnett through experiential learning projects at the undergraduate level and through research initiatives in the academy. The public history initiative contributed to the organization of Ida B. & Beyond, a one-day conference held at the University of Tennessee on March 26, 2015, featuring research on the life, work, and legacy of Ida B. Wells-Barnett and other like-minded social justice crusaders.
[i] “Marches in Parade Despite Protests,” Chicago Defender, March 8, 1913, 1.
[ii] Based upon a Chronicling America search, records of only three area newspapers exist in the summer of 1862—the Memphis Daily Appeal (Memphis, Tennessee), the Macon Beacon (Macon, Mississippi), and the American Citizen (Canton, Mississippi). Various newspapers serving Holly Springs and Marshal County since 1838 (i.e., the Marshall County Republican, the Southern Banner and the Holly Springs Gazette) had ceased publication by the outbreak of the Civil War.